Anthony Fauci (Credit: Twitter)
Dr. Anthony Fauci was “escorted” into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, “without a record of entry,” and “influenced” the agency’s review of the origins of COVID-19, House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has claimed.
In a Sept. 26 statement, Mr. Wenstrup said the new alleged evidence obtained by the panel adds to further alleged evidence slowly mounting against Dr. Fauci, who served as the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the head of then-President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response team.
This includes recent whistleblower testimony acquired by the panel alleging that the CIA “potentially skewed its COVID-19 origins review by offering six analysts significant financial incentives to conclude that the result of its investigation was inconclusive,” Mr. Wenstrup said.
It also includes recently uncovered evidence that Dr. Fauci “prompted” the drafting of a paper titled “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 and was heavily cited by experts and officials as evidence that COVID-19 didn’t originate from a lab leak.
The paper, which has been accessed more than 5.8 million times and cited more than 2,800 times, stated that SARS-CoV-2 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” but likely evolved naturally.
This mounting evidence, Mr. Wenstrup said, “lends credence to heightened concerns about the promotion of a false COVID-19 origins narrative by multiple federal government agencies.”
“According to information gathered by the Select Subcommittee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, played a role in the Central Intelligence Agency’s review of the origins of COVID-19,” the Ohio Republican said in the statement. “The information provided suggests that Dr. Fauci was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters—without a record of entry—and participated in the analysis to ‘influence’ the Agency’s review.”
‘The American People Deserve the Truth’
“Our goal is to ensure the scientific investigative process regarding the origins of COVID-19 was fair, impartial, and free of alternative influence,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote.
The lawmaker shared a letter (pdf) sent to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Sept. 26, Christi Grimm, in which he detailed the latest “concerning information” allegedly obtained by his panel regarding Dr. Fauci.
Fauci, NIH Exerted ‘Undue Influence’ in Downplaying Lab Leak Theory
(…) In July, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic published a report detailing how officials with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Fauci, and World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, among other top scientists, exerted “undue influence” in downplaying the theory that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak.
That report cited various emails and transcribed interviews and found that Dr. Fauci suggested the drafting of the now infamous “Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” paper to officials and was involved in the day-to-day creation of the paper.
The goal of the paper, according to the subcommittee, was to “disprove” the lab leak theory to avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it employed “fatally flawed science to achieve its goal” and contains arguments with “inaccurate assumptions and obvious inconsistencies.”
Earlier this month, the subcommittee also shared deeply concerning testimony (pdf) from an unnamed senior-level CIA agent turned whistleblower who claimed that the intelligence agency bribed six analysts to reject the theory that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak, most likely from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote in a letter to CIA Director William Burns.